


put me in your narrative

by 24Carrots



Series: 'Til I Make the Stars Align [1]
Category: Schitt's Creek (TV) RPF
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, Music, Noah said one of the highlights of the UC&P was playing these incredible American theaters, Pining, Schitt's Creek: Up Close and Personal, So naturally I wrote a fic about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:48:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25104952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24Carrots/pseuds/24Carrots
Summary: Dan and Noah have a moment during the 2019 Up Close and Personal Tour.
Relationships: Dan Levy/Noah Reid
Series: 'Til I Make the Stars Align [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1818247
Comments: 12
Kudos: 40





	put me in your narrative

**Author's Note:**

> This exists in the same universe as my first story [if endings are beginnings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21425092), but takes place a couple of months earlier.
> 
> The series title is from [Taller](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URgR1K9Bf8Q) by Jamie Cullum.
> 
> The title of the work is from [Work of Art](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQWOL-jNo_E), also by Jamie Cullum.
> 
> Obviously, this is fiction.

This is all really happening. That’s the thought that makes Noah’s pulse speed up when he steps up to the microphone with his guitar. Not just the tour, although he's having a great time. Something is happening with Dan. The way he looked at him before he disappeared into his hotel room to get ready for the show…he's sure of it. It's not the first time he's been sure of it. He's been sure before and wrong. But this doesn't feel like that.

He tries to shuffle that through to the back of his mind and focus on the task at hand, playing four measures of _The Best_ and waiting for the signal from the sound board operator to play them again. They fiddle around a little more. Noah sings the chorus, and then he’s done, free to snack in the Green Room until the show. 

When Dave asked Noah if he would come an hour early to sound check, he looked at Noah like he was asking for a lot. He wasn't. Noah is happy to do whatever it takes to make the night go more smoothly for Dave. And for Dan. He’s happy to be here at all. And happy this tour is giving him some extra time with…with his friends on the cast. But this part, these few minutes between sound check and when the others arrive, is his favorite. He can stand here and let the nerves shake their way out of his hands in relative privacy. He doesn’t have to pretend this is at all a normal thing to get to do.

Noah has played a couple of nice, smaller rooms in Toronto, but nothing like this tiered expanse of red chairs that will fill up with thousands of people screaming and singing along and laughing at their canned stories and making him feel like he’s with the Beatles. Heck, Paul Simon has played on this stage. Dylan too.

When he unplugs, the crew disappears backstage to go over final notes. Noah is free to go, but he's not ready just yet. He steps forward in front of the mic and looks at the big empty theater, his eyes following the interlaced whites and golds across the ceiling. If he walks around enough, his feet are bound to cross over the exact spot Dylan stood, and that’s just exhilarating and ridiculous enough that he zig-zags a few times on the way to the front of the stage. 

He sits along the apron and strums a little bit of _I Threw It All Away_. He doesn’t even know all the lyrics so he hum-sings along, annunciating every third or fourth word. He closes his eyes so he can hear the way the room listens. It’s too empty to soak up the chords the way it would if it was full, but the guitar sounds great anyway. He smiles against the echo of his own voice, round and warm, drifting back to him from the walls of the theater. 

When he finishes the song and opens his eyes, Dan is sitting in the first row of seats, right in front of him. Noah feels the red burning in his cheeks. He was doing a full-on Dylan impression by the end there, and Dan is smiling in that way he has that makes Noah feel all the things at once, a swirl of shy and caught and bold and wanting. And very recently, increasingly wanted.

It didn’t used to be like that. Well. For Noah it's been like that for a long time, but not like this. Not at all like this. 

“Are you early or did I lose track of time?” he asks. 

“Oh, no. I’m early. Just thought...um. I just was feeling restless. Back at the hotel.” Dan doesn’t look restless now. He looks amused and gorgeous, wearing one of his sweaters with bright, wide stripes of color. “That’s a sad song.”

“Yeah. I dunno. I kind of like the sad ones.”

“Yeah why is that?” Dan asks. 

“Well,” Noah stalls. “I think I get attached to things working out in a certain way. And a lot of the time things don’t work out the way I hoped so…I guess I don’t want to take myself completely out of that feeling? It’s nice to play someone else’s version of it. Give my mind something to think about that’s not so specific.”

Dan tips his head and grins in that way he has, part puzzled, part delighted. “Will you play another one?”

“Sure. Any requests?”

“Whatever you want,” Dan shrugs. “I doubt there’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of my taste and songs you know how to play.”

“True.” Noah laughs. “But there’s still time for your taste to evolve.”

“Wow,” he says, shaking his head. The smile doesn’t leave his eyes, though, so it’s fine. More than fine. 

Noah fiddles with the capo to buy himself some time to think. He could play something obvious, look into Dan’s eyes while he plays it, something impossible to take back. He could use it to say all the things he can’t seem to say.

He calls on Joni Mitchell for help. _Comes Love_ is generic enough but there’s meaning there if Dan wants there to be. It sort of seems like he wants there to be. He is a rapt audience of one, his dark eyes shining under the low house lights. 

Sometimes, when Noah finds himself caught up in a situation they’ve already played out as their characters, it shocks him how different it feels. And not because he doesn’t feel all the things for Daniel Levy that Patrick feels for David. It’s the opposite, it’s that he feels them more intensely. Feels them deeper and fuller and wilder. Feels them wound around everything he wants, loose ends wedged into the core of who he is. 

Which was fine. It was terrible, but fine. Until the tour started, and he started sitting around in airport terminals and Green Rooms and restaurants and hotels and incredible theaters like this with him. Until they started stumbling into moments like this when Dan puts away his phone and turns off the work part of his brain and is content to be just Dan with him. Noah’s never seen him do that before. Not entirely. Not like this. He wonders what it means. He worries what he’ll do if it means what he hopes it means.

Noah tries to scat during the brass interlude part of the song just to make Dan laugh, and he does laugh, right on cue. His laughter fills in around the notes and makes Noah’s gut clench, hungry and desperate to make it happen again. 

Noah isn’t really capable of turning on a performance. Not the way he can when he's acting. His only option when it comes to music is to be himself—earnestness overlaid with a little self-consciousness. Dan is better at hiding his cards, but not by much. The question builds behind his eyes, and Noah lets him see the answer if he wants to.

When he finishes the song, Dan claps, and Noah waves him off while he sets the guitar aside and hops off the stage to join him in the plush, red seats. Dan smells good, like sweet tobacco and black pepper. Noah can feel his sweater whispering against his forearm where his own shirt is rolled up to his elbows, can hear his breath quicken when he leans close. 

“I love Joni Mitchell.”

“I think you mentioned that once,” Noah says. He knows exactly when and where he heard it, in the trailer before they first kissed—and last kissed as themselves—two years ago. If Dan remembers that too, he doesn’t say. “This place is pretty incredible, huh?”

Dan looks around and shifts anxiously in his seat. “It’s very big.” 

“Sorry. This probably isn’t helping the pre-show jitters.”

“Strangely, it is,” he says with a shrug. “Like we shouldn’t talk about the _size_ of the venue but sitting here with you is…it’s helping."

"Good."

“Do you ever think about playing your music in venues like this?”

The idea that he and his Canadian musician friends would play in a two-thousand seat legendary theater in a major American city seems so absurd that Noah laughs. “Yeah remember that whole…things not going the way I hope they will thing? I’m very carefully hoping that a couple of people find it and listen to it and that it makes them happy. That would be more than enough.”

Dan doesn’t say anything right away. He takes Noah’s hand though, the soft pads of his fingers ghosting over the grooves of his calluses, still indented from the guitar strings. It’s not exactly a counter argument but it works like one. Noah’s love of music is written into his hands.

“Sometime you should play me something from your album,” Dan says, his voice low. Vulnerable.

“I will. Sometime.”

“Okay.” He finishes tracing Noah’s fingertips, but he doesn’t stop there. He’s barely touching his knuckles, the soft skin between his fingers, the veins on the back of his hand, but Noah has to try to memorize the pattern in the ornate plaster around the stage because if he looks at Dan he’s going to kiss him and if he kisses him he’s not going to stop and he has to stop. They have a show to do.

Noah imagines sitting on the edge of the stage and playing…any of the songs he just recorded. He’s going to have to come up with an explanation for some of them if he doesn’t get it together and make something happen here. He might have to come up with an explanation even if he _does_ get it together and make something happen here. 

But something is happening here. Already. Finally. “Noah?” The question floats warm across his cheek, Dan's fingers pausing at the knobs of Noah's wrist.

“Dan?” They’ve been trading the rest of this unspoken question back and forth for days. Noah doesn’t think the answer is a yes or no anymore. The answer is a time and place. 

“Should we talk first?” he asks. 

“Sure. You start,” Noah says, because the last time they asked the question, the answer was _no, I can’t, we can’t, I'm so sorry._ Noah wishes he’d said something more then, standing in Dan’s trailer. Before this got so big in his head, before there's nothing he can say that is the truth and also safe. Dan must read some of that on his face because his hand stills in his, hesitates, and Noah has to grip it tightly to reassure him. To reassure himself.

“Okay,” Dan continues, adorable and fidgety. “I know that when we—”

“Oh hey, Daniel, here you are!” Eugene wanders out from backstage, and Dan groans, and Noah laughs. Noah adores Eugene, but he seems to save all his good timing for when the cameras are rolling. 

Dan squeezes his hand before letting go and mouths, “Later.”

“Are we saying you’re a Celtics or a Red Sox fan tonight?” Eugene asks. 

“You should do the Celtics,” Noah offers, “since it’s basketball season.”

“Mmm, _basketball_ , yes of course,” Dan says, because he's already switching over to show mode where ignorance of local sports gets him a laugh every night. But it reminds Noah that he has to get him to a Raptors game if he can pry him away while they’re shooting Season Six.

Dan follows Eugene backstage and Noah makes his way to the Green Room to find the rest of the cast. 

The Up Close and Personal event has a set structure that they repeat every night, so Noah doesn’t have to concentrate too much. That’s good, because when Dan invites him to tell his Schitt’s Creek audition story, all Noah can hear is the gentle sigh of _Noah_ against his cheek a couple hours earlier. When Dan talks about _The Best_ , his hands passing his notecards back and forth, Noah can’t stop thinking about the way their palms felt pressed together. And when he plays the song at the end of the night, his voice tucking in around the audience the way it’s supposed to in this room, his mind is focused on the way Dan’s fingers felt, tracing the groove of the strings across his calluses. 

The theater clears out and Noah takes another walk to the front of the stage before they leave. This room was was built for music, built to amplify the warmth and the depth and the feeling of it along with the sound. All the false starts and disappointing turns his career has taken made it possible for him to play music in a place like this. So really, he can't complain too much about the things that don't work out.

“Hi,” Dan says, quiet like he doesn’t want to disturb him. He stands with Noah, the backs of their hands brushing lightly.

“Hey. We’re at the Beacon tomorrow, right?”

“Yes. New York,” Dan nods. 

“Dylan played there. And Queen. And Leonard Cohen.”

“Mariah Carey, too,” Dan says, and Noah laughs. “Listen. I told Annie and Em I was too tired for drinks tonight.” Dan pauses to scratch the side of his cheek. It's a tell. If he were playing poker, Noah would know he was about to go all in. “I’m, um, not actually too tired though. If you want to come by.”

“I want to,” Noah says, because he does.

After going over the flight itinerary for the morning with Dave and taking pictures with fans at the stage door and running into another group of fans in the hotel lobby though, they’re both looking a little tired.

“Give me twenty minutes?” Dan asks when they get off the elevator. Noah agrees, relieved.

Noah drops off his things in his room and takes a shower and putters around until he doesn’t think he can stall any longer. He’s at Dan’s door in eighteen minutes. He breathes out the breath he held for the whole walk down the hall, and knocks. 

When the door opens, Dan is standing in the warm glow of the foyer light, matching Noah’s grin. Dan showered too, it looks like. There’s steam coming out of the bathroom. His hair is still dry though, and tucked back into place from the disarray in which it ends every show. Noah wonders if he’ll like his hands in it. He’ll find out tonight. Suddenly, he’s sure of it. 

Dan peeks both ways down the hall and pulls him into a kiss. His breath is hot, his teeth testing Noah’s bottom lip, his hand cupped around the back of Noah’s head the way he’s done for a hundred takes, a hundred times. It’s shocking how different this feels, out of context and deeply personal. It feels real. Specific.

“Sorry, I’ve just been wanting to do that all night,” he says, his hand skating down to the nape of Noah’s neck. 

“Me too,” Noah says. “Can I come in?”


End file.
